What's This? An Art Boom in the Heartland

By STEPHEN KINZER

Published: April 24, 2002

SEDALIA, Mo. -- HERE on the heartland prairie, surrounded by corn and alfalfa fields and adjacent to the Missouri State Fairgrounds, an extraordinary contemporary art museum has opened.

Sedalia, a town of 20,000, where Scott Joplin wrote "Maple Leaf Rag" more than a century ago, fills up every summer as people come to sample homemade preserves and view prize hogs. The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art offers different pleasures, including works by Robert Motherwell, Sol LeWitt, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Julian Schnabel and Andy Warhol.

The Daum is the newest in a remarkable concentration of museums in Missouri that together offer an extraordinarily rich trove of late-20th-century art, one that prompted a Kansas City art critic to suggest half-seriously that the state adopt a new license-plate slogan: "Missouri—The State of Contemporary Art."

If some people on the East and West coasts still think they have a greater intrinsic interest in vanguard art than their brethren in the Midwest, the flowering of these museums suggests they may be mistaken. For several decades, wealthy Missourians have been competing with one another to build collections and then arrange for them to be viewed publicly. Their collecting has spurred the growth of art schools and helped create a steadily expanding crop of museumgoers.

This mini-boom may be turning Missouri into a destination for art lovers from around the Midwest. Museum administrators say they are seeing an increasing number of patrons from states nearby, some of which offer very little in the way of contemporary art.

The Daum, which is housed in a lovely new building on the campus of the State Fair Community College, opened in January with a show of works from its permanent collection. The collection was assembled over a 30-year period by a reclusive Sedalia millionaire, Harold F. Daum, a retired radiologist who made his fortune by investing in a mutual-fund company.

This spring the museum has two shows through early June, a sculptural clay invitational and a display of ceramics from its own collection.

While the Daum Museum was being built, two museums in St. Louis were also pushing ahead with major construction projects. Last October, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts celebrated the opening of a major new building designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. It was built to display works collected by Emily S. Rauh Pulitzer and her husband, Joseph Pulitzer Jr., who was the chairman of the Pulitzer Publishing Company.

This building is in the austere concrete-and-glass style that is Mr. Ando's trademark; even if it were empty, it would attract architecture buffs. Two long rectangular wings are illuminated mainly by natural light and separated by a reflecting pool. One wing has a rooftop terrace and a garden where pygmy bamboo is planted.

A two-panel, 28-foot-high wall sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly dominates the main gallery; outside is a spiral steel sculpture by Richard Serra big enough for visitors to walk through. Both were made for this site.

The Pulitzer, which is open to the public only on Wednesdays and Saturdays, is not a conventional museum but a foundation dedicated to giving people an unusual way to see art. A brochure lists the pieces on display, but there are no wall labels supplying the artists' names or the titles of their works.

Visitors are offered "a different kind of viewing experience than you get in a museum," Ms. Pulitzer said in an interview. "The idea is not to have anything between you and the art and the building. I don't have anything against big shows like `Van Gogh and Gauguin,' but some things can't be appreciated on that scale. Kelly and Serra and Ando share a particular aesthetic, and we've built this experience around it."

While the Pulitzer Foundation owns outstanding works of classic modern art, including paintings by Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Rothko, a few blocks away is an institution that focuses on the newest of the new. It, too, is in a period of transition, with both a new home and name.

Since 1981 the Forum for Contemporary Art has been showing new art in several locations, most recently a converted auto showroom. Last year it announced plans to move into a new $6 million building next to the Pulitzer Foundation, and in February it went further, changing its name to the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

The building, designed by Brad Cloepfil, an American architect, is to open in April 2003. It will look very different from the Pulitzer, with which it will share a courtyard. Floor-to-ceiling windows will allow pedestrians and drivers who are stopped at a nearby traffic light to look directly into galleries. There will also be a 3,000-square-foot space for performances and lectures and 3,400 square feet for classrooms and educational programs.

Betsy Millard, the executive director of the Contemporary, as it now calls itself, said she would continue to seek out new, young and little-known artists whose work was imaginative and innovative. Like the Daum, the Contemporary will make a special effort to spotlight artists from the Midwest.